MIDSUMMER MADNESS: IRAN

The Guardian Weekly leaves my head spinning. The meeting of the world's leading industrialized nations, the G8, adopts a goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. By then, say the environmentalists, "the world will be cooked" and the G8 leaders long forgotten. Meanwhile, Australia is drying up. In Zimbabwe 20 opposition activists have been murdered. In the New York Times, our bombings in Afghanistan killed 13 people by mistake. In Iraq, Daniel R. Verbecke, 24, U.S. Navy, is the 4,118th American to die.
And President Bush is planning a third war in Iran.

Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker (July 7 & 14) reports that last year Congress agreed to a Bush request for a four hundred million dollar escalation of covert operations inside Iran, aimed at destabilizing the country's religious government. Congress approved this without a clear idea how this money would be spent.

CIA sources told Hersh that the operations included killing, even though the mission's main purpose is to gain information and build support. The CIA director tried to assure Congress that the killing was only to allow Special Forces to shoot their way out of trouble, to avoid capture; but the congressman wrote to Bush insisting "no lethal action, period."

Who gets these multi-million dollar handouts to the Iran government's internal enemies? According to Hersh, the recipients include terrorist groups long associated with Al Queda. The Baluchi, for one, are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the Tehran regime. "These are guys," says Hersh's source, "who cut off the heads of nonbelievers -- in this case, it's Shiite Iranians." Another group is Jundallah, the Iranian People's Resistance Movement, another Sunni group, tied to the drug culture, who bombed a busload of Revolutionary Guards in 2007. Add to these the Kurdish separatist M. E. K., which, with U. S. support, has been operating against Iran from Iraq bases for years.

In an incident that recalls the phony Tonkin Gulf "attack " which Lyndon Johnson used to expand the Vietnam War to the North, in January five Iranian patrol boats reportedly made aggressive moves toward three Navy warships in the Strait of Hormuz, and, it was said, an Iranian radio message was picked up threateniing to "explode" the U.S, ships. Bush called the move "dangerous" and "provocative."

Fortunately the U. S. naval commander defused the situation. No warning shots were fired. There was no reason to fear the five boats. The "explode" message had some from a prankster.

But a few weeks later Vice President Cheney called a meeting on "how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington."

Thomas Powers, in the New York Review of Books (July 17), writes, "At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran."

What, for me, is most disturbing is the assumption that somehow we assume the legal and moral authority not only to forbid Iran to develop its nuclear power, including making a nuclear weapon, but to prevent it by an act of war. Look at the map. Iran is hemmed in by nuclear powers -- the American presence in occupied Iraq and Israel to the NW and Pakistan and India to the SE. All these countries proclaim their willingness to use all the weapons they have. Hillary Clinton threatens to "obliterate" Iran. U. S. spokesmen, including Obama, continually repeat the inane mantra, "All options are on the table." ALL options? Is there nothing we would not do?"